XML/XSLT/JS Re-sort Internal Data

My Experience With XML and its variants

My first experience with XML was long before the web came along, way back when it was part of SGML. XML was just the "customizable" tags in SGML, back when it was just a tag-based printing system for IBM mainframes. Back in the days when I was a tech writer for IBM, I made a minor, little mistake and ended up killing a few trees when I accidentally printed a manual I was writing in 100-point type instead of 10-point type. Those were the bad-old days of no-preview when writing things in SGML.

So I was able to jump right into XML and variants like XSLT when I jumped into them at the turn if the millenium. I created a number of XSLT-based utilities over the years, many of them including XPath, as you can see from the list here. Unfortunately, XSLT didn't grow much over the years. When XHTML finally petered out a few years ago, I tried to forget the whole, sad ordeal and move on, but there are lots of people who are still trying to make it a go of XSLT, including military documentors.